The paper, released last week, highlights the need to rethink the way
superintendents and school board members do their jobs in an era when
businesses are hiring away some of education's best people and states
are demanding that all students receive a high-quality education.

"Of the seemingly endless lineup of problems school districts face
today," the authors declare, "the critical need for strong,
responsible, and enlightened leadership should be at or near the
top."

The Institute for Educational Leadership, a Washington-based
nonprofit organization, prepared the study. Financed by the U.S.
Department of Education and several corporate foundations, the report
is the second of four planned to examine aspects of school
leadership.("Panel Calls for
Fresh Look at Duties Facing Principals," Nov. 1, 2000.)

Its intended audience is high-level educators and business groups,
said Mary Podmostko, a project associate with the institute, who said
the IEL hopes they will discuss the problems of district
leadership.

The panel that prepared the report was chaired by Rod Paige, the new
U.S. secretary of education, while he was the superintendent of schools
in Houston, and Becky Montgomery, the chairwoman of the St. Paul,
Minn., school board.

Because states have raised academic standards and imposed penalties
for failing to meet them, the report says, school leaders need to
reorganize districts to align their academic programs with state goals.
It calls the task of restructuring school districts as vital "as any of
those that currently dominate the education debate," such as proposals
for vouchers and policies mandating high-stakes testing.

Districts need to decide how to structure their governance systems
in order to give leaders clear direction, however. The report praises
the 146,000-student Orange County, Fla., district, where board members
provide clear policy direction and leave the details to the
superintendent. But it also touts Chicago and San Diego, where
leadership is shared by several top district officials.

Lure of Private Sector

The report calls for district leaders to be paid salaries more in
line with their duties. While noting that the average superintendent
earns $106,000 a year, the report says the range of such salaries is
broad. The result, it says, is that many superintendents quit their
jobs in search of more lucrative work.

Corporations have already scooped up several principals in
Minnesota, Ms. Montgomery said. "You have school superintendents making
$125,000 with 8,000 students, and you have a CEO with 1,000 workers
making $1 million," she noted.

The report also recommends that school district leaders receive more
and better preparation for their jobs, whether from universities or
even corporations skilled at preparing managers. In addition, it notes,
states such as Tennessee require new school board members to receive
seven hours of training in their first year.

The need for higher pay and more training, the report says, is
heightened by what it calls an "unsettling" shortage in the ranks of
superintendents. More than half the nation's 13,500 superintendents, it
says, will have to be replaced by 2008.

Finally, the study calls for school board members to review
superintendents' performance each year. It endorses using multiple
measures of student performance and progress toward improvement as
measures of district chiefs' effectiveness.

Clifford Janey, the superintendent of the 40,000- student Rochester,
N.Y., schools and a member of the task force, said he wished the report
had come out in favor of allowing schools chiefs to hire their own
senior-level staff members. A change like that, Mr. Janey said, would
enhance "the environment in which leaders work, ... allowing them to
become executives."

Other members of the task force on district leadership include: Gina
Burkhardt, the executive director of the North Central Regional
Educational Laboratory in Oak Brook, Ill.; Bonnie Copeland, the
president of the Fund for Educational Excellence, in Baltimore; Cynthia
Guyer, the executive director of the Portland Public Schools Foundation
in Portland, Ore.; and Dale Kalkofen, the vice president for district
services at New American Schools in Arlington, Va.

The other panelists include: Dannel Malloy, the mayor of Stamford,
Conn.; James Shelton, the president of LearnNow Inc. in New York City;
Marla Ucelli, the director of district redesign for the Annenberg
Institute for School Reform, also in New York; and James Woolfolk, the
president of the Saginaw, Mich., school board.

The Council of Chief State School
Officers has assembled "Standards for School Leaders,"
Nov. 2, 1996. The standards, based on research and input from over 24
state education agencies, attempt to "present a common core of
knowledge, dispositions, and performances that will help link
leadership more forcefully to productive schools and enhanced
educational outcomes."

"Mistakes
Educational Leaders Make," June, 1998, an Educational Resources
Information Center (ERIC) digest, argues that administrator training
programs need to focus as much on knowing what not to do as on
what to do.

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